Monday, October 25, 2010

Map, Second Draft

Obviously what the little pictures for each room are supposed to be will be more clear once the map gets keyed, but the basic idea of how the rooms connect to one another should be pretty clear. Lemme know if anything's hard to understand.

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Edited--thanks to Roger the GS for pointing out I had a stairwell going the wrong way.

14 comments:

The sidebar helps a lot to clarify what exactly we're looking at. Good idea that.

I would assume that the book will have some kind of explanation of what staircases and doors look like -- again assuming you're going to be using the same kind of imagery throughout -- as things like that staircase in the top left could easily be mistaken for an artistic flourish without such guidance.

I love this format. It's innovative, but also intuitive, to the extent that it could work without descriptive text. You could get some interesting variants through different interpretations of the images; (e) might contain a nest of snakes in one game, but one massive python in another. Brilliant.

This change helped me understand it a lot better too. When I saw the original map, I got a pretty good sense of the rooms, but not how they were connected (despite the obvious doors). But with the addition of the simple floor guide on the left, it makes 100% more sense to me.

There's a variety of things I like about it, but one is the relationship to real-world medieval maps. They often consisted of drawings with lines connecting them, with little attempt to convey actual scale or exact direction.

If I ever get around to making the Castle Ghormenghast supplement I've had kicking around in my head for years, this is EXACTLY how I'd want the maps to look.

I think this is an awesome idea, Zac! Making the maps cool pieces of functional art in their own right serves as a great source of potential inspiration for the DM. This is something I use my collection of old modules for all the time.